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Outside Magazine August 2002

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Into the Screaming 50s
Something happens in the high latitudes around Cape Horn. Eighty-knot williwaws blast down from the surrounding peaks. Thiry-foot waves rear up. Ships are tossed around like ice cubes in a blender. Why embark on a wind-powered expedition in these waters? For one sailor, it's a pilgrimage to the place where his great-grandfather came to grief in 1875—and a chance to comfront the raw power of the sea.

By Rob Buchanan


	Blown away: The crew of Skip Novak's Alaska Eagle puts another reef in the mainsail while racing in the Southern Ocean near Cape Horn. (Skip Novak)

THE FIRST SQUALL HITS two minutes after we stick our nose out into Bah'a Nassau. It's a towering, hazy thing that wobbles down the bay like a drunken ghost, standing out white against the low gray clouds. As it sweeps over us, the digital wind-speed readout in the cockpit jumps from 30 to 37 knots. We've got a minimal amount of sail up, just the little blade of the staysail and a quadruple-reefed main, but it's plenty. Pelagic, a sturdy 54-foot steel-hulled cutter, heels over another ten degrees and digs her bow into a cresting wave. A sheet of foaming green seawater—whether from the Atlantic or Pacific would be hard to say—washes over the top of the doghouse. Then the shot-blasting starts: hard pellets of snow that peck at the flesh like a ravenous seabird.

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Around the Horn

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At the helm, John Rice zips up the last two inches of his yellow foul-weather jacket and slides a pair of ski goggles over his face. A 66-year-old Englishman recently retired from a career in petroleum engineering, Rice has chartered Pelagic on an unusual quest. Along with two of his sons and two old family friends, he's looking for a mysterious bay near Cape Horn where, in October 1875, his great-grandfather, Edmund Rice, was forced to scuttle a three-masted sailing ship called the River Boyne, for the very good reason that it was the only way to save her.

A big gust hits, driving the lee rail under. Skip Novak, Pelagic's 50-year-old owner and skipper, comes up the companionway, looks around, and leans casually on the running backstay.

"Looks like today might be a bit of a grunt, John," Novak says.

I can't make out Rice's reply, if there is one. Down below, one member of our little expedition has already barricaded himself in the head. Soon, another will emerge from the forward bunk room, looking green. He takes one unsteady step into the main cabin, then launches a stream of half-digested oatmeal in the general direction of the galley sink. Pelagic's first mate, Rich Haworth, is stirring a pot of soup on the stove, and the projectile torrent misses his ear by an inch.

What can you say about sailing upwind in heavy weather? It isn't everyone's cup of tea, but today it's ours. We're right down at the gale-washed tip of South America, about 30 miles north of Cape Horn, heading west by southwest for Peninsula Hardy, a particularly rugged arm of the octopus-shaped Isla Hoste. Since the wind is blowing from precisely the same direction, our course is going to be one long, miserable, bow-pounding beat.

Between stints on the wheel, there's not much to do but settle in and try to find the rhythm of it. Around the galley table, Graham Rice, 35, flips through Yachting World magazine, paying particular attention to the classifieds; someday, he says, he'd like to go into the sailboat-charter business himself. Meanwhile his younger half-brother, Gordon, 19, hunkers down for a multihour chess match with Dave Fernie, 25, while Dave's dad, Richard, climbs up the companionway to spell his old friend John. It's like that all day long: up, down, steer, reef, trim, soup, zip, puke. There's not much talking, no evident father-son bonding. But slowly we claw our way up to windward.

About two in the afternoon, we tack off the north coast of Isla Grevy. Novak points out the kelpy anchorage where, one day back in the mid-1970s, the American yachtsman Hal Roth tried to secure his boat, Whisper. A 70-knot squall came in from the west and tossed the 35-foot sloop onto the rocks, severely holing her. Roth, his wife, a friend, and the photographer he'd hired to record his rounding-the-Horn experience spent nine days living under a sail before a Chilean patrol boat picked them up.

Novak's commentary on Roth's calamity is brief and dismissive. "Fiberglass," he says.

At dusk, a bit of clear sky shows itself on the western horizon, and though we don't see the sun directly, it illuminates a toothlike cordillera to the north, on Isla Navarino. I get entranced watching the squadrons of black-browed albatross as they dip and glide off the bow of the boat. No wonder the old Cape Horners revered them—they seem to thrive on the wind.

Everybody spills out on deck as we approach the high, dark silhouette of Peninsula Hardy. There's a different mood on board now. The grim determination of the morning is gone, replaced by a quiet, sailorly satisfaction. We're tired, cold, and windburned, but we've earned our way across Bahía Nassau.

All of us, I suspect, are feeling the same thing. We don't want this to be too easy.

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Contributing editor Rob Buchanan wrote about Antarctica in November 2001.

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